I'll choke on August then swallow it whole

On summer, stagnancy, and impatience

August smells like foreboding and promise, a sense of stagnancy that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, seasoned with the hopefulness of another try.

Ophelia, Friedrich Wilhelm

The summer for me is a dichotomy of boredom and peace, expertly treading the narrow line between nothingness and the fullness of possibility as I look towards another year of study.

The previous end of term feels like a sort of mirage, dissolving into the endless summer sky that stretches out above me as I read in the garden, desperate to fill the gaps of time that lay empty and bare until my schedule is loaded up again. I can’t help but feel impatient and bored in my small hometown where I’ve already lived all the life I’ll live here, waiting to dive back into the pool of city living and bustling energy that just doesn’t exist here, even when the sky turns to ink and the cold weather rolls over the buildings like a woollen blanket.

I’m haunting the rooms of my family home, a reincarnation of the little girl that used to live here and dreamed one day of getting out. There’s something bleak and wonderful about coming back, relinquishing to the four walls and my mother’s arms in hibernation.

The world is still. The clouds hang above as if tethered to the ground. The laundry doesn’t blow on the line, the grass straight and rigid, frozen in place until the frost of winter releases it.

I started the summer tired, a heavy buzzing deep in my blood that tasted like guilt if I was still for too long, but now the stillness has settled over me like the sweet syrup of figs and nectarines that drip down my chin, the honey of a dwindling youth.

I’m rested, impatient, a young child bouncing on the balls of her feet in anticipation of her next adventure. The summer is falling away in favour of a sharpness to the air and a warmth of the trees that summer only wishes it could emulate. The leaves are dying, but my life is starting up again, stretching out before me and melting into the horizon of possibility, a life that I had put on pause in the hope that it would still be waiting for me when the turning leaves summoned me back with the kiss of colder air and the smell of library books.

August is but an inkblot on the page, a comma that bled into a stain and silenced the noise of a busy life. My bones are weary with rest and my skin is mottled with sun, a reminder of the stagnancy that rots me from the inside out until I tear it out to lay on the floor with the fallen leaves and begin again.